OverviewAquaria: Sacrifice is an extensive, narrative driven prequel campaign featuring prominent characters such as Prince Drask, Mia, Naija, and The Creator. Extending beyond the current Aquaria universe will be the introduction of a number of new characters. One of these is Princess Elena, wife of Prince Drask, which will serve as the new protagonist. The story will be helped along with all new maps and a few spiffy cut scenes. Unlike Aquaria the story will be told through a classic adventure dialogue system. The name of the mod, Sacrifice, is related to the individual sacrifices made by each character.

StoryUnlike most Mithalan women, Elena never wanted to be associated with royalty...let alone a princess. However, her love for Prince Drask removed any such fears. Together they have been extremely active and effective rulers and thus well loved. Even the decision to annihilate the Krotite’s after the Erulian massacres was almost unanimously supported. But these have all failed in comparison to the loss of their god…their creator…Mithala.

Although he traveled away from his people on occasion it was for never more than a few months. Mithala has yet to return from his last journey and that was some ten years ago. This abandonment has plagued the people of Mithalas and caused obvious political and religious upheaval. Despite being religiously devout even Prince Drask has begun to lose faith.

Fearing further desertion Prince Drask feels he cannot leave his city in search of answers as he once had. His trust in those close to him has been slowly waning and as such he has turned to his wife Elena to seek council outside of their waters. As Elena begins to delve deeper in her journey she finds that all sentient life is being slowly destroyed. Her fateful journey leads her through adventures both harrowing, tragic, and strange to a final battle she cannot win. Mithalas will fall.

I was a tad bit ambitious in hoping to make a casual version of Aquaria. It's way out of my league and without a decent sized mod team just isn't going to happen so I've changed my plan. This will now be a new campaign that will follow a new character up to the point where the actual game starts (prequel).

The story will be told fairly linearly through text along the bottom to keep things simple. For example: Mia or Naija will be sitting on a rock and you click them to learn a story element. My plan is to release the campaign in three separate acts. Who knows if I'll finish it but I'm certainly going to try.

Here's an update on the EnergyTemple map which is about done. The plan is to release this map sometime this weekend (without any story elements) just to get some feedback on enemy density/layout/etc.

As promised, here is my first map in the Aquaria editor. Nothing is scripted so you will learn bind and energy forms by swimming over an invisible hotspot. Can't miss bind...energy is obtained by swimming over the same character as the official campaign.

Big thanks to Alec for answering all my questions. Can't wait to hear back from you guys.

DownloadThis demo map has been removed but will be playable in the final mod. The map has been slightly redesigned and polished with a bit more detail.

Very nice, A lot of detail was put into it, I noticed in the begin that the objects were a bit scrambled... I don't know how to put it, but in the original game it felt like every plant and orgnism had it own spot, but that soon changed when entering the energy temple, I found it very nice and also liked that you could take two ways, even though it ended up as one, confused me at times, but gave it a nice edge. I once again awe at the detail you put in, you did a very good job, which I could do stuff like that. Then the enemies started appearing, also going from very easy to somewhat harder, but nothing that can't be handled, I had only one point of damage the entire run through and that was from those Virus sorts of enemies that barrage you with bullets, was cornered within seconds.I also noticed that some of the tiles were on the wrong layers, don't know if on purpose or not, but it looked unnatural, like the columns sticking out infront of everything. And some of the plants sticking onto rocks and moss, It just looked weird.The dark layers kind of confused me, I think you put every bit of black on the dark layer (J?), while that makes your minimap black out and make them be lit up with sun form, which is bad, I advise you put some on layer 9 or so, or even make a mix of it, would be more handy. Especially things like the round stuff by exits and entrances.I found out that alot of the blue patches, that normally have healh plants in/on them, didn't have them at all, don't know if this was done on purpose or was just forgotten, I presume it was indeed on purpose.The miniboss fight with the Blaster Prime first kind of scared me, seeing I don't even remember that boss for some reason, the laugh freaked me out, propably did in the first time with the original game too, but came out of that unharmed.Then a VERY big point afaik... Edges of maps, I don't know if you realised it, but the controls of Aquaria is pure from the middle, when you go to the edge of the map, the maps stops at the edge, letting Naija get away from the center, being at the side, while the game still thinks she is in the middle, which makes you control Naija like she's in the middle while she's at the side of the map, it can be quite a bother at times.Then finally, the exit that takes you to that window kind of thing amused me, but I couldn't get back in, which bothered me again, I'm not a big fan of one way doors. And I know you didn't script much yet, but was the statue you collected supposed to show up somewhere?

Once again, very nice mod, I really wonder where you get the imagination, very good job, I hope you continue with this.

Wow! Awesome feedback! Thanks for taking the time to write all that out Alpha.

Start MapThis map was a bit of a bonus. I needed a break from the energy temple so I did a small map to lead into the Energy Temple (also to see how long a small map would take me: about 3 hours). I was pretty happy with the results but maybe the problem is that the style was used for very open water sections in Aquaria and I used it in a confined space with a lot of detail. I'll see how decreasing the number of tiles looks.

Dark LayerIt would seem obvious that the dark layer would black out the minimap and be lighted by sun form but I didn't make the connection. I'll move some of the shadows.

Weird LayersI thought the mini-boss area might look weird with all of the columns but I'll double check the columns and grass to ensure that they make sense.

Treasure AreaI made it one-way in case someone missed the entrance. They would then be curious about the window and start to look around to find an entrance but perhaps it's too obvious already so you should be able to enter through the window as well. The treasure would be displayed in the main character's home area but that doesn't exist atm and I haven't looked into any of the code...so yes atm the treasure won't display anywhere.

Map EdgesOddly, I didn't notice the problem until very recently. I use the keyboard for movement and didn't notice any problems other than the visual issue. Then again there aren't many enemies in those spots. I can easily add black space to the MapTemplate on the right and bottom side. The left and top will have to stay as is unless Alec has developed something to move everything with the transition to widescreen.

I'll fix everything I can tomorrow and change the file stored online. Glad you liked it Alpha and I get most of my inspiration from swimming around the maps Derek created.

Alright, glad you liked my feedback and that it helped, about the map edges, I hope you know that a map needs to be 256x256 or 256x512 or 512x1024.At least, that's what I know, so it might be a bit tough to fix it all if the problem is on the top, seeing the left most corner is 0,0 and the tiles have co-ords like that, so you can't expand left up, but you can expend down right.

I liked it too, only thing that bothered me was, that I did the currents (where the krotite armor is) did three times - and the onfollowing re-run of a part of the map. 1. Krotite armor, 2. bulp plant 3. after finishing the rest of the mod.